Grayworld I

Level design in UE5.5 using Scythe

Overview

Grayworld I is a hybrid level design/environment art study of the Holland Tunnel land ventilation building, turned into a segment of a game level. My focus was on player guidance through a level using the design of the space, set dressing and lighting. It’s a study of architecture and level design, as well as a showcase of my ability to put an environment together in UE5.

The Building

The Holland Tunnel land ventilation building, located on Canal & Washington in Manhattan, was constructed in 1927 to clear the Holland Tunnel of car fumes. It was designed by Erling Owre, a Norwegian architect combining Romanesque and Gothic elements with Bauhaus and Constructivist ideas. The result is a spooky, minimalist castle with an industrial interior reaching down into the mechanical substructure of NYC, a six story breathing machine.

More on Erling Owre: Link

So, I extrapolated on this theme and constructed a brief “vertical slice” style level where the player enters the building at street level and navigates through the interior until they reach a large open ventilation shaft with an elevator which can be ridden deep underground. It’s not accurate to the building’s interior structure, but I used the Library of Congress reference as primary source for look dev.

Library of Congress entry: Link

Graybox vs Final

I started this project doing blockout in Unreal and immediately ran into the issue of painful iteration. BSPs are limited, then have to be replaced with an art pass. Modeling in Blender means an annoying constant roundtrip between softwares.

Miraculously, Scythe (see: Link) was released in early access while I was working on the project, bringing Hammer-style level editing tools to UE5. I converted the project to 5.5 and redid all the level geometry with Scythe. It was well worth it, Scythe enabled me to iterate and measure effectively in Unreal and probably cut the production time in half if not more.

Breakdown

The only modeling I did on the final version is the level geometry with Scythe and the building shell with Blender. The rest of the assets are fab and quixel assets: catwalks, industrial machines, electrical control boxes, light fixtures, decals, and materials. Additionally, I made 3 basic HDAs for the project: pipes, stiff cables, and soft cables. I added some custom material functions to the megascans materials for things like distance field ambient occlusion, world space UVs, and added noise.

Sketches

Initial 3D sketching & blender blockout riffing on “portal to underground”

First pass

The first pass was pretty gnarly. The interior was fine, the vent structure was compelling but way too big, and the exterior was awful. The whole thing was stuck on 90 degree angles and frankly uninspired. I made the mistake of pushing it into set dressing and lighting early before realizing it was a fundamentally bad layout and needed to be completely redone. I kept a lot of the materials, decals and set dressing in the final version though.

Building Shell

The shell was a challenge to model, because it has such a strange structure which is what makes the facade compelling. The front is on about a 35 degree angle, with the upper section curving from the angle to be perpendicular to the sides. Initially I made a simpler rectilinear version, but then I realized the specific geometric forms are what drew me to the building originally. The “medieval bauhaus” look is gothic in a really unique way that I love.

HDAs

Pipe HDA

The pipe tool has been done a million times. Sweep along curve, bevel control points, add fittings on bevels.

Stiff Cable HDA

The stiff cables are not too different from the pipes, with wall fasteners instead of pipe fittings.

Soft Cable HDA

The soft cables are really basic, literally a sweep along a curve. I made a version that physically drapes cables, only to return to manually drawn splines because it’s simpler to art direct and bezier curves can convey weight pretty easily.

Lighting

I created some light BPs combining emissive light bulbs, static mesh housing, and spot light sources. Pretty basic but important for reuse.

Decals

Most of the texture repetition is masked with heavy use of decals. A better solution would be procedural variation or manual detail maps, but decals are always going to be essential.

Emissive planes

I used a lot of emissive planes to supplement the light sources for fill lights and art directed lighting.

Background buildings

The background buildings are put together from modular megascan building assets.

Fab assets

Biggest assets I used are:

Electrical utility pack Fab link

Catwalk pack Fab Link

Engine Hall Fab Link

Other assets used are megascan and matrix city assets.

Conclusions

Wins

• I’m very happy with the result, the beginning of the level feels like stepping into a photograph.
• Scythe + procedural tools is a really effective combo for making levels with a lot of creative freedom

Losses

• High fidelity takes forever, every element becomes a whole can of worms
• The first door is missing obvious cues, it’s not clear why the player would choose that door to try opening.